Stephen Johnson Field

“ And I cannot admit that upon a charge thus formulated the petitioner could be summarily tried. In no well-ordered system of jurisprudence, by which justice is administered, can a person be tried for a criminal offence by a court, the judge of which is himself the accuser. ”

“ The right which it confers is something more than a mere license, revocable at the pleasure of the court. It is a right of which they can be deprived only by its judgment for moral or professional delinquency.
The oath which every attorney and counsellor is required to take on his admission briefly expresses his duties. It is substantially this: that he will support the Constitution of the United States, and "conduct himself as an attorney and counsellor of the court uprightly and according to law." ”

“ Under our institutions arbitrary power over another's lawful pursuits is not vested in any man nor in any tribunal. It is odious wherever exhibited, and nowhere does it appear more so than when exercised by a judicial officer toward a member of the bar practising before him. ”

“ The State might require such oath for any period of their past lives, might call upon them to affirm whether they had observed the Ten Commandments, or had discharged any particular civil or moral duty, or had entertained any particular sentiments, or desires, or sympathies, as a condition of their being allowed to engage in one of the ordinary pursuits of life, in a profession, trade, or business. It might impose conditions which individuals and whole classes in the community would be unable to comply with, and thus deprive them of civil and political rights. ”

“ Or, take the case suggested on the argument: should an attorney, in the course of a trial, get into a personal collision with the opposing counsel or with a witness, and assault him with a deadly weapon, or kill him, the court would undoubetedly require the offender to show cause why he should not be expelled from the bar for the violence, disturbance, and breach of the peace committed in its presence. It would be sufficient to justify expulsion that he had so far forgotten the proprieties of the place and the respect due to the court as to engage in a violent assault in its presence. ”

“ It is because of this limitation upon the extent of judicial inquiry into such matters that a proceeding for purely professional misconduct against an attorney may be taken in any way which will sufficiently apprise him of the grounds upon which it is founded, and afford him an opportunity to be heard. It is not as thus limited a criminal proceeding in any proper sense, requiring full and formal allegations with the precision of an indictment. ”

“ By the seventy-third section of the act of April 14, 1834, it is expressly enacted that 'if any attorney-at-law shall misbehave himself in his office of attorney he shall be liable to suspension, removal from office, or to such other penalties as have heretofore been allowed in such cases by the laws of this Commonwealth.' We do not mean to say-for the case does not call for such an opinion-that there may not be cases of misconduct not strictly professional which would clearly show a person not to be fit to be an attorney, nor fit to associate with honest men. ”

“ Nothing could more plainly illustrate the wisdom of the rule that the accuser should not be the judge of the accusation. The judge very naturally felt great indignation at the lawless proceedings of the mob in hanging the prisoner, and, as he states, had heard reports inculpating the petitioner as a participant therein. His indignation, whether arising from such reported participation or otherwise, must have possessed him when he had the petitioner before him, for nothing else can explain the extraordinary conclusion he reached upon the testimony taken. ”

“ Many persons, eminent at the bar, have been chargeable with moral delinquencies which were justly a cause of reproach to them; some have been frequenters of the gaming table; some have been dissolute in their habits; some have been indifferent to their pecuniary obligations; some have wasted estates in riotous living; some have been engaged in broils and quarrels disturbing the public peace; but for none of these things could the court interfere and summon the attorney to answer, and, if his conduct should not be satisfactorily explained, proceed to disbar him. ”

“ When the charge against the attorney is of misconduct in his office, and that involves, as it sometimes may, the commission of a public offence, for which he may be prosecuted criminally, the inquiry should proceed only so far as to determine the question of professional delinquency, and he should be left to the proper tribunals for the punishment of the crime committed. ”

“ Its maintenance would tend to repress all independence on the part of the bar. Men of high honor would hesitate to join a profession in which their conduct might be subjected to investigation, censure, and punishment from imputations and charges thus secretly made.
Seeing that this must be the inevitable result of such an unlimited power of the court over its attorneys, my brethren are careful to express the opinion that it should seldom be exercised, when the offence charged against the attorney is indictable, until after trial and conviction, unless its commission is admitted. ”

“ An attorney may be struck off the roll, first, for a breach of the rules of the court; second, for breach of any of his official duties; third, for all such crimes and misdemeanors as affect his moral character. But in this third class of cases we cannot proceed in the ordinary way; there ought always to be a previous conviction before this court can interfere. ”

“ If a party indicted is, upon trial, acquitted, the court cannot proceed to retry him for the offence upon such a motion. He may answer, after acquittal, that he never committed the offence, and that no tribunal can take any legal proceeding against him on the assumption that he had been wrongfully acquitted. And what the court cannot do after acquittal it cannot do by such a proceeding before trial. ”

“ The constitution deals with substance, not shadows. ”

“ Every person unable to take this oath was declared by the constitution incapable of holding in the state "any office of honor, trust, or profit under its authority, or of being an officer, councilman, director, or trustee, or other manager of any corporation, public or private, now existing or hereafter established by its authority, or of acting as a professor or teacher in any educational institution, or in any common or other school, or of holding any real estate or other property in trust for the use of any church, religious society, or congregation." ”

“ This provision excludes an inquiry, and, of course, any possible punishment for an imputed crime, except upon a conviction under such presentment or indictment. If a party is otherwise tried and punished, the constitutional guaranty is violated in his person.
If one court can, upon information communicated to its judge, in any other than a legal way, that a public offence has been committed by an attorney, call upon him to show satisfactorily that the charge is unfounded or be disbarred, so may all courts which have the power to admit attorneys, and, of course, this court. ”

“ In Ex parte Burr, 2 Cranch, C. C. 380, the charges against the attorney were for malpractice in his profession, in advising a person in jail, who was either a recognized witness or a defendant for whom some person was special bail, to run away; instituting suits against parties, and appearing for parties without authority; bringing vexatious and frivolous suits, many of them for persons utterly insolvent; purchasing a lot at a trustee's sale of an insolvent's estate under unfair circumstances; making fictitious claims and bringing suits with a view to extort money ”

“ It was objected that the court would not exercise its summary jurisdiction when the misconduct charged amounts to an indictable offence, as was the conspiracy in which the attorney was engaged. But the Chief Baron, Lord ABINGER, answered that he never understood that an attorney might not be struck off the roll for misconduct in a cause in which he was an attorney merely because the offence imputed to him was of such a nature that he might have been indicted for it ”

“ I have known applications of this kind, after conviction, upon charges involving professional misconduct; but we should be cautious of putting parties in a situation where, by answering, they might furnish a case against themselves, on an indictment to be afterwards preferred. On an application calling upon an attorney to answer the matters of an affidavit, it is not usual to grant the rule if an indictable offence is charged. ”

“ Doctrines are sometimes advanced upholding the most arbitrary power in the courts, utterly inconsistent with any manly independence of the bar. The books, unfortunately, contain numerous instances where, for slight offences, parties have been subjected to oppressive fines, or deprived of their offices, and, consequently, of their means of livelihood, in the most arbitrary and tyrannical manner. ”

“ The power to punish for contempt-a power necessarily incident to all courts for the preservation of order and decorum in their presence-was formerly so often abused for the purpose of gratifying personal dislikes, as to cause general complaint, and lead to legislation defining the power and designating the cases in which it might be exercised. ”

“ Or, take another case mentioned on the argument,-where an attorney has presented a false affidavit, or represented as genuine a fictitious paper. The use of such documents, knowing their character, is a fraud upon the court, an attempt to deceive it, and constitutes such professional misconduct as to justify the imposition of a heavy fine upon him or his temporary suspension or expulsion from the bar, without reference to the materiality of the contents of the false affidavit or of the fictitious paper ”

“ If possessed of fair learning and ability he may reasonably expect to receive from his practice an income of several thousand dollars a year-equal to that derived from a capital of one or more hundred thousand dollars. ”

“ The statements thus made to him were not evidence before the court for any purpose whatever; and would not justify its action upon any subject over which it has jurisdiction. Suppose that he was called to the stand, and asked why he had made the charge against the petitioner, and what his knowledge was on the subject. He could only have answered, "I can state nothing of my own knowledge; I can merely repeat what others have said to me; they decline to make any charge themselves; they will not confront the accused ”

“ The testimony of this witness, which was reduced to writing, is contained in the record. It is to the effect that he saw the petitioner and others go to the sheriff's house on the sixth of March, and, having heard that a sheriff's posse had been summoned to protect the jail, he thought, by their orderly manner, that they were the posse going for instructions; that when they came out he heard one of the party remark, "We have got all of you we want;" that he then thought something was wrong, and followed them, and saw them coming out of the jail with the prisoner ”